Seeking Your Help - A Future for More Human Work

Everyone seems to be talking about the changing nature of work. The primary change dominating everyone’s attention? Automation, especially the more sophisticated automation enabled by AI and machine learning. Unfortunately, the future of work conversation today is inevitably framed as “win-lose,” a zero-sum game – worker-less factories, driverless vehicles, the end of “robot-proof” white collar jobs – with companies and workers pitted against each other. Companies win by implementing technology to cut costs and reduce headcount, and workers lose when robots and machine learning take on their jobs.

We believe this win-lose framing is misguided. As companies continue to face mounting performance pressures, the efficiency gains from automation and other technologies won’t provide adequate ongoing performance improvement. Continuing to focus primarily on doing things faster and cheaper not only leads to diminishing returns but also squanders the opportunity to redeploy human capabilities—the workforce—to focus on activities that will create new value. Yet, in a future of intense competition and rapidly changing conditions, finding ways to create new value is an imperative. And workers--with their potential for curiosity, creativity, imagination, empathy, and resourcefulness--are uniquely capable of continuously developing new ways to create new value. Far from a workerless future, we see human workers as key for success. Our hypothesis: a sustainable future of work will be a win-win, both good for the company and good for the worker, because it has the potential to create far more value in the marketplace and for the worker. I wrote about this opportunity and imperative with Cathy Engelbert here.

To be clear, though, we’re not talking about narrowly “re-skilling” workers so they can do remaining routine tasks efficiently and reliably. Nor are we talking about “augmenting” worker capability by training them how to use the data and analytics generated by artificial intelligence to do their remaining routine tasks more efficiently.

We’re talking about stepping back at a fundamental level to redefine work so that it shifts workers away from routine tasks to focus their time and effort on sustained creative problem-solving and opportunity identification in ways that deliver more and more value to their stakeholders (whether they’re customers, suppliers or internal “clients” served by support functions like IT or Human Resources). As this work gets redefined, there will be a need to draw out the broader capabilities that all humans have like curiosity, imagination and empathy, rather than focusing on narrowly defined skills.

We need your help

Unleashing this human potential to create value is going to require redefining the work that humans are doing. So, technology aside, as a first step we’re looking for a few good examples of where a company (or business unit or function) has re-defined, or is trying to re-define, the work of its organization. Specifically, we’re interested in cases where the routine, structured work of a group was deliberately reconsidered and transformed into work that taps into the creativity, curiosity, imagination and empathy of the workforce to create new value for internal or external customers. Again, we aren’t particularly concerned with whether this transformation was precipitated by new technology or not.

We’re simply looking for stories of where highly structured work was made more fluid and creative for a workforce of some scale, and ideally for operational workers rather than those typically considered “knowledge workers.” We’re also particularly looking for examples within large, traditional companies rather than start-ups or technology unicorns. Just to make it even more challenging, we'd especially like to find examples where this redefinition of work has led to tangible performance improvement in terms of value generated or impact achieved (not just doing something faster or cheaper).

Do you have any ideas for organizations we should look into? We’d love to hear them. Please reach out and let us know (you can either comment here or send me a message) – we’re anxious to start doing some deep dives to explore this emerging edge and we need your help. There’s a big opportunity out there and we want to inspire more executives to pursue it.

Comments

Fredic Laloux "Reinventing Organizations" like Buurtzorg, Sun Hydraulics and Patagonia. Carol Sanford in her books has great examples for initiatives within large enterprises like Google and Colgate Palmolive.

My particular passion is increasing engagement in productive activities(sometimes called work, but think that has connotations I don't like)

As we move from Command and Control to environments with more agility and organic responses, we see that not going that way is a huge disadvantage.

Engaged are 100-400 more productive than unengaged. Teams and companies that use frameworks, culture and practices to generate engagement raise their performance proportional to the amount of engagement.

It is a new mindset which some are not embracing easily especially those who enjoy power. Ultimately they will have to change or the world will pass them by. Power has little functional use in a fully engaged organization.

I have an example of an organization that has been re-defining collective approaches to solving big data problems in Earth science. This organization is owned and run by volunteers who work in NASA/NOAA/USGS data centers, in universities and research labs (e.g., Battelle), in beltway technology firms, or in non-profit institutes; more than 100 organizations are members at present. Instead of (and perhaps in anticipation of) redefining their government agencies, for the past twenty years they have created and run a virtual organization called Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP).

ESIP is a place where these Earth data scientists can collectively explore solutions to the use of petabytes of very diverse data in the science of understanding the entire Earth system. ESIP has a reputation of being a place where you can “get things done”.

ESIP gets things done by enabling the passions of its members to work together. Any small group of ESIP members can request a “cluster” to solve a common problem or to investigate an emergent opportunity. The same day they request a new cluster, they are given whatever they might need as a group to collaborate: AWS capabilities, a github repo, a wiki, a slack channel, teleconferencing, email listserve, etc. Here is a 6 minute video on why ESIP clusters: https://youtu.be/8WChkPllW_0

ESIP meets in person twice a year; a Winter meeting in DC and a Summer meeting usually at a member University. Again, ESIP has been working to redefine its meetings through experimentation and iteration. The goal is to host the best Earth science meetings on the planet. ESIP meetings began as standard academic conferences (people giving papers). Today nobody gives a paper at an ESIP meeting. For more than a decade ESIP volunteer “visioneers” have been tweaking and improving the meetings to maximize social interaction and celebrate passionate collaboration. Here is a short video on ESIP meetings: https://youtu.be/3WQyMOkvdpM

It would be really interesting to discover how ESIP has been helping member organizations to re-define their internal work too. This could be a good model for other businesses.

On a personal note… I have served as the volunteer ESIP President/Board Chair in the past, and also, for a time, as a staff member (Community Architect). I’d be happy to talk with you and to introduce you to the current President/Vice President.

It seems that we at Nearsoft don't quality as we are not particularly large and we've been a self-managed company from the start, eleven years ago.

My suggestion is to reach out to Doug Kirkpatrick, from Morning Star. He will definitely have good suggestions for you. The most recent one is about Hier, a Chinese company that has transformed itself into more of a self-managed company. They are big and have can attest to great results after their transformation.

Another good person to reach out would be Chuck Blakeman, author of how Making Money is Killing Your Business.

Finally, the team at Corporate Rebels has been talking with the kind of companies you are looking for.

I am including their emails here for obvious reasons, but I'd be happy to connect you, if you wish.

Dear John, Thanks a lot for your continued work around what is essential of “Power of Pull“.

I wish I could name companies (other than BMW where I had the pleasure to see what the future of work, pulling workers'/employees'curiosity and passion in its early days, 2003-2007, when processes/systems were significant different from the “old“ plants in Bavaria) that have recently (within the last ten years since the financial crisis) transformed themselves.

There is so much untapped opportunity around, and probably some more c-level executives as well as middle managers and workers/employees daring to step up and start the change.

Presently, economic pressure (China coming in strong), unstable political situations (Russia, UK (Brexit), Europe), and the faster accelerating exponential technologies springing and their convergence seem to hold back positive action. At least that is what I perceive over here in Germany.

An exception, though not visible too much, is the transformation of Volkswagen and its Dresden-based Gläserne Manufaktur. They have done quite well the transition from being producer of the top-class Phaeton, to full-electric (the eGolf is produced in two shifts now with an output of 70 vehicles per day.